I got in the Deathmobile and nodded at my copilot, who had his service revolver on his lap, his finger inside the trigger guard. The roadblock was pulled apart, and I accelerated into a blinding wall of snow. Concentrating on my driving kept me reasonably calm, but I felt cut down the middle: half of me proud of my performance; half of me frightened that the dead man’s Cadillac would be discovered while I was stuck in Huyserville — or that after I left and the corpse was found, my presence would be remembered and I would become a murder suspect. The fears seemed insoluble, futile to speculate on. I cleared my throat and said to the trooper, “Is there a hotel in Huyserville?”
He snickered. “Cockroach palace. If you have to stay overnight, stick to the jail. You’re a transient, right? Three hots and a cot’s all you guys want, and you get that at the slam — if you’re innocent and we let you go.”
I nodded. The trooper had an unpleasant conversational style, and I remained silent and let him fondle his gun. The storm was raging now, and it took me an hour to drive the ten miles to Huyserville, a town consisting of one business block and the Wisconsin State Police Substation where I was to be held. Pulling into the station lot, the trooper said, “Sure hope you ain’t guilty, pal. Two of the dead girls were from here.”
The station’s interior was spotless and surprisingly modern, and I was placed in a cell by myself. Only moments later, an old man carrying an archetypal black satchel showed up, and the cell door was racked by remote control. I rolled up my sleeve automatically, and the doctor removed swabs and a syringe with a plastic tube at the end from the bag. He said, “Make a fist,” and when I did, he swathed the crook of my right arm and inserted the needle. When blood filled the tube, he said, “An hour for the results.” and left me alone. When the cell door was racked shut, I got very frightened.
The doctor’s hour stretched interminably, as did my fear, which was not fear of being uncovered as a long-term mass murderer — but fear of being contained, not held in custody, but in the captivity of all the small moments of my past four years — the long, small moments not spent stalking, stealing, killing and thinking — but the time spent working at tedious jobs, cultivating invisibility, being cautious when I wanted to act boldly. The fear was that, inexplicably, these hick-town cops knew who I was, and knew further — inexplicably and preternaturally — that the most vicious way to punish me was to turn me loose, never to scheme/stalk/steal/kill again — my sentence a life made up of all the long, small in-between moments that used to allow me my freedom.
The hour stretched, and I knew that the sixty minutes had doubled and tripled, and that if I looked at my watch for corroboration I would lose every bit of my thirty-year cache of control. I thought of reaching for Shroud Shifter as a separate entity, and rejected the idea as naked regression; I began to fear that killing and holding in sex to the explosion point had somehow changed my blood type, and now I was going to be castrated for someone else’s crimes. The notion of foreign blood inside my own body brought me close to screaming, and I began cataloguing long, small in-between moments to prove to myself that I wasn’t going insane. I thought of every fleabag apartment I had lived in since leaving San Francisco; every stretch of desolate road where I never found anyone; every person I met who was too ugly, too poor, too well-connected and too uninteresting to kill. The litany had a salutary effect, and I looked at my watch and saw that it was 6:14 — my brain-tripping had eaten up over four hours. Then a voice outside the cell resounded softly. “Mr. Plunkett, I’m Sergeant Anderson.”
Before I could think, I blurted, “Was my blood all right?”
The voice said, “Red and healthy,” and the man it belonged to stepped into focus on the other side of the bars. My first impression was of looking at the most immaculate advertisement for authority I had ever seen. The man, clad in the Wisconsin State Police uniform of olive twill trousers, tan gabardine shirt and Sam Browne belt, was a perfect componentry of muscular litheness, bland good looks and something else that I couldn’t place. Standing up, I saw that he was just over six feet tall, and that his lank, reddish brown hair and toothbrush mustache gave him a youthful aura that his cold blue eyes played against — and lost. The exquisitely tailored uniform transformed his good looks into another something else I couldn’t decipher, and when we were face-to-face, with only the bars between us, it hit me. I was in the presence of an exceptionally powerful will. Regrouping, I said, “Red, healthy and O negative, right, Sergeant?”
The man smiled and patted a paper bag he was holding. “Right, O negative. I’m O positive myself, never made me more than a five-spot when I was broke in college.” Taking a key from his belt, he unlocked the door, and when I took a step forward, he blocked my path. For an instant the cold blue eyes fired up, then a lopsided grin nullified them, and Anderson said, “You ever notice how two people just getting acquainted talk about the weather, Martin?”
The softly enunciated “Martin” terrified me. I stepped back and said, “Yes.”
Anderson stroked the paper bag. “Well, we’ve got some real weather to talk about — twenty-six inches of snow expected by morning, tristate storm warning, roads closed within a five-hundred-mile radius. Look, I hope it wasn’t presumptuous, but Lieutenant Havermeyer got called up to Eau Claire, which makes me acting watch commander, and I took the liberty of booking you the very last available room in Huyserville.” He took a key from his back pocket and handed it to me, and when our fingers touched, I knew he knew.
“Martin? You feeling a little queasy?”
The soft, solicitous words went through me like a knife, and I started to weave on my feet. Anderson himself was a blur, but his hand on my shoulder was like a tree root holding me up, and his voice was perfect clarity. “Baaad weather. I was patrolling south of here this morning, saw this ’79 Caddy Eldo parked on the throughway, didn’t look nice, so I pushed it off the shoulder, probably covered with snow by now. Wonder what happened to the driver. He’ll probably end up in some timberwolf’s lunchbox, nice juicy humanburger. Don’t you want to know what’s in the bag?”
Shroud Shifter sent me flash-lines of asterisks, question marks and numbers, and when the numbers computed to 1948–1979, I tried to bring my hands up to Anderson’s throat. But I couldn’t; he was holding all two hundred and five strong pounds of me still with one firm hand on my shoulder and the admonishment, “Ssssh, ssssh, ssssh.”
Swaying underneath the trooper’s hand;
Adjusting to the rhythm and somehow liking it;
The cell about to tilt upside down, but saved at the last second by a choirboy voice: “I don’t think you can handle seeing it, so I’ll tell you. I’ve got a beautiful Colt Python with a pro-model suppressor, and some credit cards, and some of those True Detective magazines, and some ripped-up Polaroid photos, allll taped up and smeared with fingerprint powder, which reveals — you guessed it — two viable latents belonging to Martin Michael Plunkett, white male, D.O.B. 4/11/48, Los Angeles, California. Does it ever snow in California, Martin?”
The hand and voice let go, and my back hit the metal edge of the top bunk. The contact jarred me, and Anderson came into real focus — as an adversary. Straightening up, I began to sense the vaguest outlines of the game he was playing. I could still feel his hand and voice, but I was able to shake off their residual warmth and say, “What do you—”
I stopped when my voice came out an imitation of Anderson’s, softness wrapped in menace. Anderson smiled and said, “The sincerest form of flattery, so thanks. What do I want? I don’t know, you’re the Hollywood boy, you write the scenario.”